Wojtek the Bear [paperback]

by Orr, Aileen;

  From this awful moment in late September 1939, three diverging paths led into the future for Poland’s soldiers. On one point, however, everyone was united. Poland, unlike France or Belgium or several other nations conquered by Hitler, would not surrender. Józef Piłsudski had written that ‘to be defeated, but not to give in, is victory!’ Somehow, somewhere, the war to restore an independent Poland had to go on.

  The first of the three paths led across Europe to France and Britain. The second path led back into occupied Poland itself, into the armed resistance movements which at once began to spring up. The third path began in the prison camps and convict settlements of the Soviet Union, and traversed vast distances to cross Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt before reaching Italy. It was along this third journey, the longest and most arduous of them all, that Polish soldiers found and adopted a bear cub they named Wojtek.

  All these paths had branches, potholes and forks. All those who travelled on them hoped that they would finally converge in a liberated and democratic Poland. But most of them did not live to see their grandchildren reach the end of those roads. Poland did not regain full independence and democracy until 1989.

  The first path began at a bridge, which crossed a shallow frontier river called the Czeremosz. For a week or so after 17 September, the Soviet forces did not seal off the borders in Poland’s south-eastern corner, allowing the army commanders and the president to cross into Romania followed by tens of thousands of officers and soldiers. Many others escaped over the southern mountains into Hungary. A third group headed north into Lithuania, then still precariously independent, and was interned after surrendering.

  On 30 September, a new government-in-exile was set up by General Władysław Sikorski, who became both prime minister and commander-in-chief. Based in Paris, this government was in many ways a coup against the old Sanacja regime carried out by Sikorski, a famous officer who had gone abroad in the 1930s in order to form a centre of opposition to the ageing Piłsudski and his successors. Even before Sikorski took over, officers and men were escaping from Romanian internment and heading west to rejoin the war. One group of soldiers from Romania and Hungary managed to find a ship to Syria, where they joined French forces as the ‘Carpathian Rifle Brigade’. But the bulk of the troops who had escaped the Nazi and Soviet armies were transported to France. There they were joined by volunteers of Polish origin from all over western Europe to form a force which eventually numbered some 80,000 men.

  Early in 1940, troops from Sikorski’s army in France went into action with British and French forces during the inconclusive Norway campaign. When the main German offensive burst into France that May, the Poles fought skilfully, but they were driven back and separated by the rapid onrush of the Panzer divisions and by the collapse of French units on their flanks.

  France surrendered on 22 June 1940. Sikorski had already moved to London with the exile government, and some 23,000 of his troops – most of them evacuated from the ports of northern and western France – managed to reach Britain. Several thousand naval and air force personnel were already there, including the Polish pilots who were to play a decisive part that summer with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. But the Poles had to leave three-quarters of their men behind. Most of them became prisoners of war, or crossed into neutral Switzerland, preferring Swiss internment to German captivity. Other Poles made their way across Spain to Portugal, hoping to travel on to Britain. Others again went underground in France itself, and later joined the French resistance.

  In Britain, now facing imminent German invasion, Churchill and Sikorski agreed that the Polish army from France should be sent to Scotland. There it could re-arm and retrain with British weapons and equipment, and at the same time guard the Scottish east coast against a German landing. The first tented camps were set up between Edinburgh and Glasgow, near Biggar, Crawford and Douglas. Later, more solid accommodation was found or built for the Polish forces, as their main concentration shifted to Fife, Angus and Perthshire. General Marian Kukiel, the officer commanding this 1st Polish Corps in Scotland, set up his headquarters at Bridge of Earn. It should be added that one of Sikorski’s first acts in Scotland was to set up a detention camp for his political enemies, mostly old Sanacja officers who were trying to undermine his authority. This camp was near Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, known to apprehensive Poles as the ‘Isle of Snakes’.

  It was to be a long time before these troops were called into action. But they trained hard, once they had overcome the gloom of their second defeat, and they were made welcome. A Scottish–Polish Society appeared, organising hospitality and entertainment, while the lord provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh – especially Sir Patrick Dollan (‘Dolanski’) from Glasgow – raised funds and held supportive rallies for the Poles. A variety of special university courses were set up for the Poles, and a Polish School of Medicine at Edinburgh University awarded degrees throughout the war.

  In small-town and rural Scotland, their exotic uniforms, the strange language and the outgoing charm of the ordinary soldiers made a lasting impression on communities which had never had much contact with foreigners before. Young women, unused to men who kissed their hands and danced like Fred Astaire, were especially taken with the Poles. This often led to complications, not least religious misunderstandings as a Catholic soldiery sought love and friendship in a Presbyterian countryside, But over 2,500 Scottish women married Polish soldiers during the five-year stay of the 1st Corps.

  As time passed, the 1st Corps grew in numbers. A few thousand Polish soldiers were able to escape from occupied Europe, mostly though Spain, Portugal or North Africa. Later, beginning in 1942, about 7,000 men and some women arrived in Scotland from Palestine and Egypt, a small fraction of those who had escaped from Soviet captivity through Iran. (Their main body remained in the Middle East, to form what was to become the 2nd Polish Corps commanded by General Władysław Anders.) A new source of recruits opened after the Normandy landings in June 1944, as ethnic Poles unwillingly conscripted into the German armies surrendered and – after screening – volunteered to join the Polish forces. Some 33,000 of these ‘Wehrmacht Poles’ reached Scotland in the course of 1944, followed by another 15,000 up to the end of the war.

  By now, though, other Polish troops were leaving Scotland and going into action in northern Europe. Two new formations had been trained up and equipped. One was the Polish Parachute Brigade under General Stanisław Sosabowski, which did most of its training in Fife around Leven and Largo.

  Sikorski’s original idea, and the inspiration for the Brigade’s morale, had been to drop the parachutists into Poland itself, to achieve the nation’s liberation as an advance-guard of the Western Allies.

  But as the Soviet armies began to approach the Polish frontiers, long before the British and Americans could open a second front in France, it became obvious that Poland would be liberated by the Red Army alone, and the plan to send the Brigade into Poland was shelved. In August 1944, during the doomed Warsaw Rising, the British turned down desperate but impractical Polish appeals to let the Brigade join the insurgents. It was not until the next month that Sosabowski’s men finally went into battle, as part of the disastrous Allied attempt to seize the Rhine bridges at Arnhem by mass parachute landings.

  The other formation created in Scotland was the 1st Polish Armoured Division. Led by the legendary General Stanisław Maczek, it numbered about 15,000 men. Maczek embodied Polish military history in his own person. By the time that his division landed in Normandy in July 1944, he had fought in the First World War (in the Habsburg army), in the defence of Lwów against the Ukrainians in 1918–19, in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920, in the September campaign of 1939 in Poland, and in France in 1940.

  At the climax of the Normandy fighting, the Polish tanks were sent to close the Falaise Gap, the exit from a pocket in which two German armies with several Panzer divisions had been encircled. Maczek’s men, heavily outnumbered, took the full force of the German armour trying t
o escape. The Poles held on, and Falaise turned into the bloodiest defeat the Wehrmacht experienced at the hands of the Western Allies. Later, the 1st Armoured Division drove eastwards across France and into the Low Countries. The Poles are still joyfully remembered for liberating the Dutch city of Breda, and streets are named after General Maczek there and in Antwerp.

  At the end of the war, the division fought its way into northern Germany. But after the Nazi surrender, both the 1st Armoured Division and the Parachute Brigade (which had also entered Germany in early 1945) took on a new role: the rescue of the enormous mass of Poles who had landed up in Germany as slave workers, concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war and even children removed from their parents by the Nazis for ‘Germanisation’. Hundreds of thousands of penniless, emaciated human beings were now on the roads, seeking food, shelter and repatriation. To help them, the Polish Army took a bold step. With British permission, they took over the town of Haren, expelled all its German inhabitants, renamed it ‘Maczków’ in their general’s honour and converted it into a huge reception centre for displaced Poles.

  The second path back to a free Poland lay through resistance within Poland itself. This meant almost exclusively resistance to the German occupation. The massive deportations of the Polish population from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union made partisan warfare there almost impossible to organise. In any case, the Nazi invasion in June 1941 transformed the Soviet Union from enemy into ‘gallant ally’.

  As the September campaign ended in 1939, Polish units – cavalry as well as infantry – were already taking to the forests and mountains. In cities and towns, centres of patriotic conspiracy sprang up. Poland had been defeated but had not surrendered, and there were to be almost no collaborators with the Nazi occupation. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, ‘there was never any Polish Quisling, for the simple reason that in Poland the Nazis never really tried to recruit one.’ Their long-term plan for the Poles was to enslave and ultimately to exterminate them, not to enlist them as allies. This gave the Poles a simple moral choice: to fight or to be obliterated.

  By November 1939, Sikorski in France was in contact with many of these resistance groups, drawing them together into a coherent command structure answering to the government-in-exile. The movement eventually took the name of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) or ‘AK’ for short. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, a separate, militant but much smaller Communist resistance appeared, the ‘People’s Guard’ or ‘People’s Army’ (AL). But its relations with the AK were wary, and it took orders from the underground Communist leadership rather than from Sikorski’s government in London.

  As German repression and deportations for forced labour grew more intense, the AK was joined by ‘peasant battalions’ raised from the countryside. By 1943, it had become the biggest resistance movement in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually numbering over 400,000 men and women. But the AK itself was only the military wing of a complete underground state, equipped with a Delegatura representing the exile government, with ‘councils’ drawn from the main political parties, and with most of the apparatus of a normal country down to a chain of clandestine universities and a vigorous illegal press.

  For the London government-in-exile, keeping in touch with the AK and its affiliates was difficult; dangerous but crucial. In Scotland, at training centres at Polmont and Largo or at the Polish ‘spy school’ in Glasgow, agents were trained as parachutists and radio operators and dropped back into Poland from long-range aircraft. Many were lost, but gradually regular and reliable radio communication between the Delegatura, the AK command and the London government was established. Even riskier was the return journey of couriers from Poland, sometimes smuggled on neutral ships through Scandinavia, sometimes – later in the war – picked up by Allied light aircraft from secret airstrips. (In July 1944, the AK used one of these flights to deliver to the British the working parts and guidance system of a prototype V-2 rocket, stolen from a Nazi missile range.)

  The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziorański) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the governments of the democracies were slow, even reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

  In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In 1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

  After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay just outwith the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

  In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which resisted were burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

  These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of ‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

  In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

  By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the Wehrmacht out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

  Worse still, they treated the AK uni
ts which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a future Communist government of Poland.

  For the London government and the AK command, the outlook in the spring of 1944 was grim. It was now obvious that Stalin intended to set up a puppet Communist regime in Poland, or at least a government which took its orders from Moscow. He would ignore the legal government-in-exile, and suppress its armed forces. As the Soviet armies blasted their way through the Nazi defences in eastern Poland and headed towards Warsaw, Polish leaders adopted a new and desperate plan of action.

  Operation Tempest was meant to be an all-out general uprising in the path of the Red Army. In one district after another, the retreating Germans would be overcome and the Soviet generals would arrive to find a region of Poland already liberated and under the control of the London government. Unfortunately, Tempest was an almost complete failure. The Polish partisans fought valiantly and often drove the Germans out, but the Soviet forces were under orders to suppress them. In their moment of victory, the AK battalions were rounded up, disarmed and interned. The Polish officials they had appointed in the liberated areas were arrested.

  In late July 1944, Soviet tank patrols were seen in the Warsaw outskirts, on the far bank of the Vistula. At the same time, German civilians and officials in Warsaw began to evacuate the city. General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, in command of the AK, now took a snap decision to order a general urban insurrection. His hope was to liberate Warsaw, so that the Soviet allies would enter the free capital of Poland already under the authority of the legitimate government-in-exile.